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"New" and "Improved"? Really?

This was one of the advertising lines, like "batteries not included," "prices may vary," or "side effects may include..." that turned into a joke. I am not laughing, though. Here is a list of products I (or other members of my family) used to show brand loyalty to, that have either been made "better" or eliminated completely in favor of a "new" version:

- Stain Stick spot remover (hard to find, apparently still being made)
- Baggies non-zip plastic storage bags (what if I don't need it to seal, or that seal stripe gets in the way?)
- Wisk "regular" detergent (it went away for a time, and now is back and "better" than ever?)
- Avon face cleanser (no "better" version so far, and I already have to settle for an "improved" one years back)
- Pantene shampoo for graying hair (no people that fit THAT demongraphic, eh?)
- Hershey's Special Dark flavor chocolate syrup (I see it mainly on discount shelves and buy up as many as I see)
- Chocolate Chewy Chocolate Chip Chips Ahoy (can't find anywhere)
- Pillsbury Cinnamon Rolls (now with less-tasty Cinnabon cinnamon)

It's this last one that was the vacuum-sealed tube that broke the consumer's back. If I wanted Cinnabon, I'd buy theirs. I may have to compose a "well-written letter" and channel my inner Sio Bibble old geezer. It seems whatever product I prefer gets changed far too often, or is the least popular and goes bye-bye from the shelves.

Anyone else want to rant, or am I the only fist-shaking, porch-yelling, git-offa-my-lawn one willing to get out of my chair, stick my head out the window, and yell, I'm as :hell: and I'm not going to :take: it anymore?

The one that bothers me is shampoo. Every time I find a nice, plain shampoo, it seems like the company decides to go after more of a "beautician" market, with tons of very specific formulas, none of which are anything like "this gets your hair clean." I think they're trying to get women to buy those, and have men give up and buy their overly fragrant "men's shampoos" so every household has to have more than one bottle.

Campbell's soup has gotten rid of 5 different soups I liked so that there is barely anything left they make that I can stand. And the quality of the chicken in their soups has gone down. On another note, I learned how to make my own soups because of this. My family asks me to make them soups all the time now because they are so much better than store bought.

Now if I could just learn how to make authentic Asian sauces...

Guitar Strings are another product that eliminated what I used in favor of "improvement." I've been a GHS guy for 20 years. The Zakk Wylde heavy gauge sets they had for years were perfect for what I was doing at the time. Then Zakk left the endorsement deal a couple years ago and it's been hard to find those gauges with the same brightness in tone since.

Then we can go into audio recording hardware... Used to be we used PCI Express cards mounted directly into the Motherboard. Now everything is USB2.0 or sometimes Firewire. I don't trust USB2.0 to handle latency issues at all. Maybe I'm getting too tech geek here with this one...

And back to Star Wars a bit... The upcoming Wave 5 Stormtrooper is the current Wave 2 Sandtrooper without the pouldron. I am not a fan of those ball-jointed hips. I understand the need for them with a Dewback or a Tauntaun or a bike of some kind. I do not see a need for them with a standard figure. They are annoying and my Wave 2 Sandtrooper keeps falling over (even with a stand). Bring back the Stormie (without the removable helmet!) from TVC 2007 en mass please.

Irish Spring soap now smells like the cheap knock-off version of Irish Spring that we used to buy when we couldn't afford the real stuff.

Borden sliced sandwich cheese now takes like the plastic that it's wrapped in.

Kraft Sandwich Spread, the stuff that's kind of a mayonnaise and relish mix, tastes horrible now. I used it for the first time in over a decade, back in 2003, and I thought I had gotten some rotten meat, it tasted so bad. I couldn't even finish the sandwich and I had to just throw the entire jar away.

I also never realized how terrible Pepsi and Mountain Dew now taste until I drank some of those Throwback versions that were made a year or so ago.

Finally, Taco Bell meat, what happened to that stuff? It used to be awesome, now it tastes like sawdust.

"To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence… When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up." - C.S. Lewis

A lot of generic brand plastic baggies are still made without the zipper, just got to hunt around in that always crowded aisle.

Most of those I find are the sandwich "tuck under" bags, where you fold the opening underneath when you put something inside it; mainly I used them to keep meat in the freezer from freezer burn, but without the cracking of the zipper part. Oh well.

And taking some marketing courses in the past tells me WHY these "improvements" are made in the first place, and it has something to do with copyright law and how long you get the rights. If you make a "minor" change, you get the new rights as a "new" product. Alas, some of these changes mess up the original, and clearly make at least us as customers irked.